| Naviance is something of a sore subject with me, as I convinced our reluctant HS counselor to subscribe to the service, only to be told a few months later that she didn't have time for it, the tech guy wasn't helping her, the district wasn't giving her the information she needed, our school was so small that the scattergrams would be meaningless ("We've only ever had one student apply to Williams, so what's the point of having a scattergram for Williams?"), that the information we needed about GPAs and SATs of admitted students was readily available in college guidebooks anyway, so what was the point of having school-specific info, that the graphs didn't take into account extracurriculars, recruited athletes, legacies, etc, and so on and so forth. Our school does release a table of students accepted/denied at the UCs each year, which shows GPAs, SAT 1 and 2 scores, semesters of honors and APs, and the college that student eventually attended. (And it's such a small school, and so many of our kids apply to the UCs, that I can tell you the SAT scores and GPAs of most of my kids' friends, just by looking at the schools they are attending!) If we had this info info in graphical form for the colleges that a number of our kids apply to, I could plot my kid's GPA and SAT scores and say, "Look at all the red Xs - better think about applying somewhere else" or "Blue and green Xs -good chance at this school! Go for it" using real-world data from our specific school. It would be particularly useful early in the college search process, to give families an idea whether there was a realistic chance that their kid would be accepted at a particular college, especially for the more numbers-driven schools to which many of our students apply. But the counselor doesn't see this, and there's no convincing her. I've been trying to use last year's data to create an Excel scattergram for the UCs myself, but I'm so computer illiterate that it's slow going. It's really frustrating. |